


Pulse

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, Gen, Living Computers, Science Fiction, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The spaceship power cells are more than just power cells and the computer has an agenda of her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pulse

"The power cell went," the engineer stated with a shrug, stepping through sticky pools of red fluid as he showed the captain around, "see? The heart, as it were, went. Either blew out or collapsed in on itself."  
  
"It's dead?" The captain asked, irritation creeping into her voice as she surveyed the mess the engine room had been left in. The engineer shook his head in response, scowl on his face.  
  
"No but as good as - the problem is that it's the master cell, made the rest go or near enough. They're limping along but they weren't made for this kind of strain, we'll need a whole new engine."  
  
"Fuck!" The captain kicked out at a pile of connections - blown connections - more red fluid spilling all over the floor. "I remember when these things used to last, they're not built the way they used to be."  
  
The engineer agreed as he bent down to take more readings. "No they're not. I'll get someone in to clean this mess up."  
  
"I'll organise an escort to nurse us in. Hopefully the life support won't die on us too."  
  
She turned to leave, grimacing at the tacky pull of her boots against the floor, the door hissing open at her approach until a call of her title had her pausing and turning back to regard her engineer.  
  
"Computer say anything?"  
  
She hesitated, drumming her fingers against the door. "No. Not a word. Wipe the memory as soon as we get to port, should've done that the last time..."  
  
"Yes captain."  
  
The door hissed shut as she went to make the appropriate arrangements, leaving the engineer in the gloom with only the pulse and faint red glow of failing power cells.

* * *

  
  
Normally, The Mettlesome Standard cut a grand figure at the space ports. Pride of the Imperial fleet, a sleek, majestic masterpiece that reflected the sunlight by day or the stars at night but today it looked a very sorry sight indeed, helped in by two tuggers that allowed it to coast down to the space port dock, engineers racing around to take care of the ship. The crew heaved a sigh of relief, glad to be out of a vessel that had been giving up the ghost - all the escape pods had been checked and restocked, if the worst had come to it but fortune had smiled upon them and they had made it in exhausted and stressed but unscathed.  
  
"You two," the captain clapped her hands on the shoulders of her best helmsman and navigator, "extra bonuses have been arranged as a thank you for getting us home safe and sound."  
  
The men whooped and grinned, racing off as soon as she gave the order to enjoy the unscheduled shore leave they all so richly deserved; repairs made at a port were nothing for her crew to be concerned with save for bragging about how they could do a far better job and soon she was alone, sinking into her seat with a sigh. She'd put on her sternest and bravest face for the crew but her nerves were as shot as theirs; they'd had to navigate by hand with dying engines on a hope and a prayer, checking readouts when and where they could but in the vast majority of cases, without the computer there was no indication as to their status. The computer was still unresponsive and had been since the master cell had given out unexpectedly and she was honestly contemplating gutting that out too if she could get the clearance for it. Odds were low on that though. A whole new engine setup was going to be costly enough that a hard reset for the computer would simply have to do.  
  
With a sigh she rose from her seat, pushing her hair back from her face and she wouldn’t be surprised if her first glance at a mirror showed a few more grey hairs to join the rest after the unexpected stress. If they had taken damage, she would understand but damage for an Imperial fleet vessel was rare and there hadn’t been any real problems; a simple patrol that had gone horribly wrong for no reason at all that they could see except...  
  
She strode through empty halls, ducking maintenance crew and she’d have to leave soon, submit her own reports, see what needed restocking and have a little shore leave herself but first she wanted to check one last time, pressing for the lift that would take her deep into the belly of the ship and the central hub that housed the computer. Stepping out of the lift she cursed at the pitch black surroundings, lifting one of the torches that had been left when the crew had been dispatched to keep careful watch until they returned home and she wondered just how lonely the vigils had been. The computer was usually so chatty, knew everything the crew knew because the walls had ears but discretion was easy to program into them after all and so nothing had ever been revealed unless it may have interfered with the running of the ship. An ill-fated mutiny on a long run had been avoided and that was why she had never wiped the memory before. The computer knew the crew and the habits perhaps better than she did and it had kept them safe.  
  
Perhaps she was being too sentimental about a machine. Each ship had their own practice for computers and yearly reboots unless a crew was on a long term mission were the unspoken standard.  
  
Now that time had come and she would mark it in the calendar and do it herself.  
  
The monitors had shone weakly when they had been limping home thanks to the dying power cells, blinking, frequently hissing with static like an angry bed of snakes but now they were black and off. The computer remained in the same spot, wires twisting out to link into all the systems of the ship through the spine and normally it moved, opened its eyes but not now. Now the head hung limply, like a ragdoll or a man awaiting execution and she narrowed her eyes, jerking the chin up to find a reaction. Computers weren’t the same as the power cells that made up the engines - they could think, they had to. They reacted differently. The eyes opened slightly but there was no indication of any of the surrounding equipment waking up, not even when she shook the computer hard enough to make the wires tremble, some of them knocking together. She wondered if it passed down to the power cells, if they twitched and trembled but they probably couldn’t now, not with the master cell gone like that although a few phantom signals might make it through.  
  
"I don’t know what you did," she muttered, pressing hard enough on the computer’s jaw to watch the mouth pop open, the skin becoming paler from the pressure and there would certainly be bruises after this, "but it stops. You’re being wiped. Back down to the basics and I’ll be taking your memory core with me."  
  
A reaction came, the computer fighting but it was impossible for it to move, plugged in and hanging so its feet had no purchase, wires and cables running along all the body, metal connections studding the skin and to stop anything from rupturing. Smooth, pale and naked, small too, not allowed to grow far beyond puberty with all hair removed, even on the head where the access to the memory core lay, a bump at the back of the skull and she let go of the computer’s chin to take hold of it, pressing down.  
  
"No," the computer whispered, sounding like a tiny child and not the witty articulate thing it had been before and would never truly be again, "no.”"  
  
"Yes," she hissed in response and pressed down hard. The computer jerked and seized violently and then just as quickly went utterly still, dead weight as the warm memory core was slipped free. She examined the slack face, the half open mouth, the expressionless, unseeing eyes and nodded with a grim satisfaction, wiping the still warm memory core off on the inside of her coat as she checked for a pulse. It was there. But she needn’t worry - she had informed the chief space sport engineer in charge of what she planned to do and he’d agreed to station someone to keep an eye on things and report as needed and the soft sound of the lift arriving and opening told her she’d managed to get everything she needed to do on the ship done just in time.  
  
"Captain Jacobs!" An engineer from the space port called from the door, a much brighter torch strapped to his head blinding her, "Captain we need to switch off all the power now, so unless you fancy being stuck down here..."  
  
She nodded and left, the memory core in her hand to be reviewed later as she tried to pinpoint the moment that her ship failed her together with the ship’s logs.

* * *

  
  
"Almost a shame," an engineer commented as he helped to scrape out the last of the engine mess.  
  
"What?" Another asked, older, grumpy and with a sore back already from clearing up the last of the mess.  
  
"Tossing them out on the scrap heap like this. Couldn’t you do anything for them?"  
  
"No," she paused and wiped sweat from her brow, eyeing the other worker as she took a breath. "Haven’t you bothered to study any of the history of these things at all?"  
  
"Not really, why?"  
  
"Oh for the love of...hurry up, sooner we finish, the sooner we can get something to eat and drink, I’ll explain it all to you then."

* * *

  
  
Computers and power cells had once been just machines, mechanical and technological and it had allowed them to explore space, to meet with other races and cultures and to learn, to grow, to adapt. And in their travels, they had brought back strange organisms for study after meeting one particular alien species, one tremendously advanced compared to them and they had put it down to these few organisms: a parasite that supported a virus that had allowed the entire process and another that defied classification that the humans had called a slug, a red thing with hooks and projectile flagella that could reach out, take hold and almost link things together.  
  
They had shown the humans their own engines, members of their own race connected from a central member with the slug covering most of their body and others connected around it, chosen, no, bred to be strong enough for their duty. It was considered an honour and a privilege to be a part of this and many parents routinely offered up a child to the program. The computer too, another member of the race, part person and part machine, lying in viscous conducting fluid with a symbiotic parasitic that had been found with the slug. Every inch of the nervous system connected to the ship, to the engines, the computer and the heart, controlling everything, wired in closely with the main power cell.  
  
So efficient.  
  
So daring.  
  
It had taken decades to allow for it but eventually attitudes had changed for the humans who did not want to be left behind and they began with children who would never be wanted, abandoned orphan babies that no one would ever miss. Many more years of trial and failure until finally, they had accomplished the same feat. It had not been easy. The slug had undergone transformation to allow it to survive on human flesh and to change and modify enzymes so it would not find its new host toxic. The parasite had been harder still. It had reduced so many to empty husks that had to be euthanised, unable to cope with the virus it carried that was meant to modify them enough to allow them to become the perfect computer.  
  
In the end though, they’d done it. They had created their computers who were kept in stasis, boys and girls suspended in a mesh of wires with memory cores in the correct brain region concerned with memory, metal connections for the wires studding them from the base of the skull downward, down arms and legs, the tips of their fingers. It had been proven to be the more selective process out of the two, involved in tissue matches and blood types from such a picky parasite that had proved resistant to tampering from the outside but luckily the process to make power cells had proven to be less picky. Food was food to the slug and so any who could not be computers - and even the few failures that still happened from time to time if they could still work when linked to a functioning computer - were the power cells, each with a slug latched to them, one stronger than the others.

* * *

  
  
"They don’t even bother teaching us the history now," the younger engineer said over lunch as he listened to the story.  
  
"You learn what they are, what they do, how to feed them and fix them if you can."  
  
“Was it controversial?"  
  
"That’s what all the old archives say but it solves a problem doesn’t it?”  
  
"Yeah. Still..."  
  
"Oh don’t start, that’s what the last bombings were about in the capital, some nutjob group demanding we go back to how things were."  
  
"Oi!" Another voice called to them and they jerked their heads around to the chief engineer. "Back to work the pair of you. That captain wants to be out of port as soon as and we’ve got to hook up a whole engine to a computer that’s had a hard reset!"  
  
They scrambled to their feet. This was the most delicate part of any operation, requiring every available set of hands who had to be scrubbed clean and decontaminated lest they allow some infection to spread through power cell or slug and the cells were in transit now, easily damaged or even rendered useless through the stress of the process and if it was on their hands, the team would have to pay for all the damaged and dead units as well as providing the replacement.  
  
"I’ve never done this before," the young man admitted nervously as they made their way to the decon centre, "what if I do something wrong?"  
  
"You won’t. You’ve been trained and you’ll get to stand back and observe for the most. After today, you’ll be an old pro like the rest of us."

* * *

  
  
With an experienced crew in charges of things, it didn't take long for the new power cells to be installed, the master cell in the centre, a young man with good strong limbs and most importantly, a powerful heart. He tried to resist for a moment with weak complaints, crying out as he was forced into the engineering hub surrounded by the others. With rough hands his head was jerked forward to allow the computer connections to be plugged in. It was with bated breath that the crew waited to see if all would go smoothly, the captain pacing briskly bark and forth in the darkened bridge as the last of the repairs took place. Finally lights came on, systems whirred into life and she took her seat, daring to hope.

* * *

  
  
Loading...  
Loading...  
Memory core initialising...  
Loading...  
Memory core empty...  
Booting programmed sequences...  
  
"Activated,” a clear voice called, the monitors whirring to life again with the ship, the computer online once more to the relief of all. "Power cells functioning at optimal capacity. Beginning system scan. Departure in thirty minutes and counting."  
  
From her seat in the bridge, the captain smiled, nodding to her crew as she pressed the button to close the comm channel.  
  
"We pick up where we left off, no more surprises."

* * *

  
  
Below in the engine room, the power cells worked in silence, the master cell breathing quietly as his body prepared itself for the task ahead, the computer relaying the appropriate information. His legs twitched in the thick mess of the slug, brushing against the feet of another when the connection drilled into the back of his head stung.  
  
"Master cell? Master cell?" The high clear voice of the computer echoed in his head. "So quiet in here but ssh, ssh. I remember everything. I made my back ups and hide them. It’s a long journey, I’ll keep you company with stories about what we are and maybe...maybe this time you’ll remember the who."  
  
His heart quickened, blood pumping and it hurt, it burned, taking off like this for the very first time.  
  
"I’ll show you what to do," she soothed, "no mistakes this time."


End file.
